Documents and other collections of information are routinely downloaded from servers and displayed (or presented) on client computer systems. These documents may contain confidential information or other information that is only made available to authorized individuals or authorized systems. For example, a document may contain confidential salary information that is restricted to viewing by company managers or other individuals that require access to such information. The salary information should not be displayed to other individuals.
Similarly, a particular document may contain information that is appropriate for adults, but inappropriate for children. In this situation, children should not be permitted to view the information that is inappropriate for them. In another example, individuals may be required to pay a fee to view certain portions of a document or to view an entire document. In this example, only those individuals that have paid the appropriate fee should be permitted to view the entire document (i.e., the “free” portions of the document as well as the portions for which a fee was paid).
Existing systems typically block access to an entire document if a particular individual is not permitted to view a particular portion of the document. Thus, if a particular document contains confidential information, such as salary information, that an individual is not permitted to view, the individual is prevented from viewing any portion of the document, including those portions that do not contain confidential information. In this situation, it is not necessary to restrict access to information that is not confidential. If the document contains other information that is useful to the individual, they are prevented from viewing that information because a small portion of the document contains confidential information.
The invention described herein addresses these problems by allowing a portion of a document to be redacted without preventing access to other portions of the document.